


The Unseen (or A Midnight Picnic)

by Nightlightinthedark



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fluff and Mush, M/M, Midnight Picnic, One Shot, Poetic, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), Star Gazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 14:11:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20707331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightlightinthedark/pseuds/Nightlightinthedark
Summary: You had asked me once, in the early morning, when we were wisps of smoke curling around each other in the tentative orange light,I can sense love… can you sense something?Written in response to a tumblr ‘ask’/prompt for a fic about Aziraphale and Crowley stargazing outside their South Downs cottage by the sea.





	The Unseen (or A Midnight Picnic)

Midnight. On and under blankets while the waves crash, rough sand and twig, near the cottage we’ve called home for a while. Nine? Ten? Twenty? After six-thousand years, no one counts, just as no one counts grains of sand on a beach. 

The astonishing open sky hangs, cold and distant blanket above our close bodies in repose. 

“My dear, you  _ made  _ them.” 

_ Did I?  _ You don’t chuckle, because you know it isn’t a joke. 

_ What is it, to create? _

_ To reveal something _ , 

pull it together and out from the darkness where it has waited since the first angel’s breath caught in their chest at the newborn knowledge of things felt and unseen, out from behind the curtain of black nothingness, the lack of echo, and show it for what it already was. 

It is muscle and toil and sweat. What has the gardener to do with the making of a plant? Nothing more than planting seeds and watching them transform, in wonder. Yelling and commanding them, at times. But do they listen? Or do they just resume their course.

You had asked me once, in the early morning, when we were wisps of smoke curling around each other in the tentative orange light,

I can sense love… can you sense something? 

and my mind sought something solid gold while grasping nothing but thin air. I had shrugged. 

But there  _ is _ something. 

The thing about humans is… the thing about language is… they’ve come up with words for what  _ you  _ sense, for the ache in the gut, the electric-prickling, the soulwrenching sacrificial  _ I will do anything (for you) _ ,  _ I will die if you go.  _ In English, it is rather small and inadequate. But it gets the job done; has a go at expressing the inexpressible. 

There is no name for what I sense. 

Readjust your arm around my waist, my love, it tickles. Your head on the bones of my chest, the weight of so much grey matter on the small birdbone of me, I won’t move, or this delicate crystalair moment might break. 

The stars blink as if they don’t want to reveal the full knowledge of their secrets, more ancient than tombs. Yellowwhite. Red. Purple light. 

_ I saw it all before it was there. When it was hidden.  _

All that waits, silently vibrating in different wavelengths beyond the veil of the mortal seen, curled in corners of the air that others angel, demon, human, think aren’t there, cannot perceive. The stars, swirling glittering galaxies of diamond bright, holding their breath for millennia in the space of complete and utter absence, and 

_ I knew they were there. I called them into the seen.  _

In the saltair chill, you sit up, look down at me, wondering. I push up onto palms, chest and mouth so close to yours that your breath is my breath. 

Years before, just after the end of the world that wasn’t, you had also asked me something else. Something that burned. In front of a fire, in the living room, when I thought you had been reading and I was closing my eyes, (Why didn’t you ever give up on me?) It burned in the implication that a final goodbye was ever a thought, a possibility.  _ You can sense love, can’t you? How could I leave, when I felt…  _ I’d been offended. 

But now, staring into your ocean eyes, your heart pumping in sync with mine like a glow echo in the darkness, I know the answer. 

_ I never gave up on you because I felt the potential for this—this here, now, this moment—from the very beginning. I saw it, sensed it like stained glass gospel truth in the center of my consciousness, in the light touch of your hand and the curl of mouth and the quivering jelly of you, from the first moment I was.  _

Long and heavy silence in the starlight black. 

Regaining the power of speech, you ask me, so why didn’t you call it into being? Could you have done it, like the stars? You didn’t have to wait so long for me to find a way… 

And I think (first realization) maybe I could have.  _ I’m sorry for making you wait _ , (whose voice said it? it could have been you or me), and all I can do now is apologize with my hands, and with my lips (on your neck, on your ear, on your mouth, on your...) and by pulling the blanket closer around us, 

Under the stars, outside our home, where all beyond the veil is no longer hidden. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This one’s kind of an experiment; please let me know what you think!
> 
> Influences for this lil fic are all over the place. There’s a bit of Neruda, Cisneros, and Billie Eilish (yep) in there for sure. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


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